Colson Whitehead’s new novel has been out for several months, but we’ve avoided mentioning it, as we are not big fans of the horror genre. But the San Francisco Chronicle ran yet another story on the book yesterday, so we have decided to face our fears:

…”Apex Hides the Hurt,” shares much stylistically with his two previous prize-winning books (”The Intuitionist” and “John Henry Days”) — dark humor, imaginative tangents and puns galore — and a subject that is a smart meditation on these times…

…The central character of “Apex” doesn’t have a name, but he is a professional namer. The title of the book is taken from one of the namer’s most famous creations — the slogan for the bandage Apex — it “hides the hurt.” He’s ludicrously good at his job, but he doesn’t seem to care about that. He doesn’t seem to care about much; his tone is generally sour.

Naming, apparently, has failed to help him move beyond appearances.

That last sentence we can vouch for. Ouch.

After leaving his firm for unknown reasons, the namer goes to a small town with a naming crisis. It’s currently called Winthrop, and the town’s leaders are split on whether to keep it the same (as Councilman Albie Winthrop would prefer), change it to Freedom, which was what former slaves christened the town, or opt for the name that the namer’s former firm chose, New Prospera.

This is scary stuff, so scary that we couldn’t get the idiot in the pointed hat to come out from under his Davenport to comment.

The University of Pennsylvania has, perhaps unwittingly, made a move that has torn asunder the universal fabric we all rely upon when sorting out what’s what. You no longer have a foundation for logical, intuitive or comparative thought.

In the new paradigm, “The Di Vinci Code” is well-written and compelling, syphilitic nutria have not colonized the length of Brit Hume’s intestinal tract, and the Wharton School listed ONE AND ONLY ONE item as required reading for its product marketing course, “The Igor Naming Guide”.

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Via Business 2.0

Google may be the most recognized new 21st century brand in the West. But in China, its name was a dog. Surfers had been pronouncing the unfamiliar “Google” as “gougou” or “gugou,” among other variants – meaning “doggy” and “old hound.” An easier-to-pronounce name is just one of the reasons why rival Baidu has been eating Google’s lunch in China. That’s why the company tweaked its iconic name yesterday as it opened a new engineering center in Beijing. Google renamed itself “Gu Ge” (pronounced “goo-guh”), which China Daily elaborately translates as “song of the harvest of grain.” Google (Research) officials said the new name projected “the sense of a fruitful and productive search experience, in a poetic Chinese way.”

What a dim sum of thinking this is. Let them pronounce Google any way they want. Americans find it difficult to properly pronounce high-end names like Audi and Porsche, so each name has an Americanized pronunciation, no biggy.

And the “old dog” as a negative is a glaring red herring. Yahoo means “idiot” in English, Crossfire implies “violent death” and Gap means “missing, broken or incomplete”. The idea that consumers process names literally is false. They process them in the context of the experience and the brand.

And give the Chinese some credit, they know that Google is not a Chinese word with Chinese meanings! Wang Laboratories, one of the iconic pioneers of computing, was founded by Dr. An Wang in Lowell, Massachusetts. Certainly they could have changed their name to accommodate Americans that might be put off by a name like Wang. But there was no need. Everyone understood that Wang was a Chinese last name and was not being used in the sense of Johnson, an American last name. Even though Wang was an American company. The same holds true here.

The notion of splintering a brand name like Google into different names for different countries, based on the sophomoric understanding of naming demonstrated by their explanation, is truly absurd.

There are no new rules of naming.

Says Blandor the Imponderable: “‘Gu Ge’… which translates as ‘song of the harvest of grain…the sense of a fruitful and productive search experience, in a poetic Chinese way’, is MY SHCTICK!!! This is no lesser a transgression than if Gallagher were to wear Robin’s rainbow suspenders or if Mr. Williams were to smash swollen cucurbitaceae on stage! I demand redress!”

More posts about China Google

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